Resident Astronomer, Hobby-Eberly Telescope

The University of Texas at Austin, McDonald Observatory, is hiring a resident astronomer (RA), the on-site scientific observing specialist for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). The RA employs various facility instruments and has the opportunity to conduct personal research while contributing to the scientific community at McDonald Observatory.

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is one of the world's largest optical telescopes, with its 10-meter mirror. It is optimized for spectroscopy, the decoding of light from stars and galaxies to study their properties. This makes it ideal for searching for planets around other stars, studying distant galaxies, exploding stars, black holes, and more. The HET is a joint project of The University of Texas at Austin, The Pennsylvania State University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. See https://mcdonald.utexas.edu/research-facilities/HET.

The HET operates on a 24/7 schedule and is located at McDonald Observatory, 16 miles from Ft. Davis, Texas (440 miles west of the UT Austin campus). Frequent night, weekend, and holiday duties are required, along with occasional on-call responsibilities. Residence within the Observatory's residential community is available and may be required.

Preferred qualifications:

• PhD in astronomy or physics, or equivalent.
• Two years of instrumentation, observations, or data reduction experience working on 3+m class telescopes in optical and/or near-infrared spectroscopy.
• Postdoctoral research experience and a strong track record of research outputs and publications.
• Capacity to oversee software development related to data acquisition, reduction, and analysis.
• Proficiency in using Linux operating systems; experience writing code in Python or C++.
• Ability to conduct personal research projects with the HET or other McDonald telescopes.
• A strong demonstrated commitment to service astronomy.